


Read-Only Memory

by Sharksdontsleep



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Action/Adventure, M/M, Pre-Canon, Robot/Human Relationships, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-12
Updated: 2017-02-12
Packaged: 2018-09-23 16:13:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,955
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9665087
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sharksdontsleep/pseuds/Sharksdontsleep
Summary: It begins on a ship much like any ship. Imperial, overheated, crashing. Cassian rescues him, but he doesn't know it until later. He rescues K-2SO before there is a K-2SO, when he is a model number, a locus on a network, before he has become himself.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Kudos to Joatamon for the swift beta and wrangling all my comma foibles. I can be reached at dontsleepsharks at gmail and at tumblr.

> x  
> define sample (x)  
> sample((memory (cassian), all))  
> x[order(x)]  
> xx = (length(x))  
> i = 0  
> for(ir in rank(x)){  
i = i + 1  
xx[ir] = x[i]  
}

> all(xx==x[order(x)])  
> [1] TRUE

Or, memory. A vector of ordered points.

It begins on a ship much like any ship. Imperial, overheated, crashing. Cassian rescues him, but he doesn't know it until later. He rescues K-2SO before there is a K-2SO, when he is a model number, a locus on a network, before he has become himself. 

It ends much the same way, but we have not arrived there yet. We are as now on a vector, a shape with distance and direction, of great or small magnitude, a beginning but not an end. 

Or that has not yet discovered its end. 

Imagine this: A child on a peaceful planet, stylus in his hand. He draws a point on a data pad, extends a line from it -

“How many points in a line?” he asks.

“An infinite number,” the teacher says. She smiles at him, at his thin boyish limbs and disobedient hair. At the smear of red Festian dirt smudged on his forehead. 

“What is infinite?” he asks.

“The stars in the sky,” she says. “All the stars, and all the worlds, the planets, the universe, the Force - the Force is infinite.”

The boy considers this. He draws an arrow on the end of his line.

“Good, young one,” she says. “Now it is a vector. It will never end. It is an infinite number of points.”

“Is one infinity bigger than another?” the boy asks, looking at the figure he’s drawn.

She does not answer.

When he looks up, the teacher is gone and, in his hand, the stylus has turned to a blaster.

It is not his memory, but one told to him, a memory of a memory, a dream told to someone who does not sleep. Is it a true memory? An extrapolation, perhaps, a set of memories all pushed together, like the last scraps of a meal, taken together to be something sustaining.

“You do not remember anything before that?” K-2 asks. Humans lose things, seemingly constantly: The smallest screwdriver in a kit, the pull tab to the zips on their jackets, their lives. But to lose memory? The idea of forgetting, not erasing it, wiping it, overwriting it, but merely losing a memory like a misplaced coin - he could never understand.

“Some things are better to forget than to remember,” Cassian tells him, voice sounding hollow.

It is those things K-2 knows that Cassian doesn’t forget. 

 

Cassian begins as small boy on Fest, before K-2 knows him. He begins for K-2 as an imperial spy, one who gives a small misplaced laugh during K-2SO’s maintenance. Then there are explosions, the ship’s hull breaching, a slow descent into the inky depths of nothing - a crash without an impact. They don’t wait for it. 

Instead, they run, run, run into the safety of Cassian’s get-away ship. He rewrites a command, removes a set of code - and then K-2SO is no longer obedient, not to the Empire, not to his makers, not to - 

“Goddamn it, K. I told you to stay in the ship,” Cassian says, much later, days in fact, a thousand thousand thousand fractions of a second. 

Cassian has one weapon trained on the stormtrooper in front of him but there are others converging and K-2 has a much longer reach, better odds, and he tells Cassian so, tells him down to the last decimal place possible how much better Cassian’s odds of not throwing his life away like it’s waste down a trash-chute are now that K-2 is here.

“You blew my cover,” Cassian says, later, when they’re back at the ship and K-2 is helping patch a scrape in Cassian’s side.

“They were shooting at you, Cassian. I think they knew who you were.” 

Cassian doesn’t wince at all as K-2 irrigates and dresses the wound, even though the scrape must be painful. There’s sand in it, irregular and jagged, big enough to see detail on with only 10x magnification.

“Accurate reporting of injury is critical to accurate mission predictions,” K-2 says. “Also, if you cannot fire a blaster, you will need to give me one.”

“I’m not giving you a - hey!”

“So, it hurts, then,” K-2 says, removing his fingers from where he’d poked Cassian in the side. “This would be easier if you lied less.”

“I’m not lying when I say it doesn’t hurt, K-2.”

“But you’re not telling the truth, either.”

“Mostly, I don’t notice,” Cassian says, but only moderately grumbles through K-2’s remaining examination. 

 

It’s quiet on Cassian’s ship. K-2 is unaccustomed to being alone - the Imperial network was always full of droid chatter and human command, none of it interesting but it was all unrelentingly _there_ , and its absence is new.

Cassian, it seems, is unused to being accompanied and he startles a little whenever K-2 comes into the cockpit or sits across from him at the tiny mess table that barely accommodates two chairs.

There are others’ belongings, K-2 finds, objects that don’t seem to be Cassian’s, but do not appear on the registry of standard-issue equipment Cassian provided him with to complete inventory. 

“I’m not the first partner you’ve had,” K-2 says.

“Spies work alone, mostly,” Cassian says. “But there have been others I’ve traveled with.”

He does not say ‘partners’ or ‘team members’ or ‘friends,’ and perhaps these absent travelers have been none of these. 

K-2 isn’t quite sure what he is and when he asks Cassian, the answer he gets is, “a pain in the ass, mostly.” Which does not answer the question.

Still, the orders they get - or the orders Cassian chooses to relate to him - are for both of them. 

“This will be dangerous,” Cassian says, as they dissect Draven’s latest orders, which K-2 has spent the past few hours decrypting. As if K-2 is unaware that this will be dangerous.

“Running mission simulation currently,” he says. 

“K-2, listen, if this isn’t something you want to do -”

“You cannot compel me to leave,” K-2 says. “Besides, we are in a ship right now. In space. Leaving would be difficult.” 

“I wasn’t going to _make_ you leave,” Cassian says. “It’s just - this isn’t what everyone chooses. I was offering you a choice.”

“I’m an Imperial droid. What else can I do but either be here or return to the Empire?” 

“If this isn’t something you want to do,” Cassian says, and he pinches the bridge of his nose in a gesture K-2 has come to understand as ‘exasperation,’ “you have a choice.”

“Thank you for the reminder that I no longer have to obey you,” K-2 says. “Now I was going to relate the mission simulation, if that’s OK with you, _Captain_.” 

Cassian presses his lips together. “That would be fine, K-2. Proceed.” 

It’s an undercover mission, mercifully short: Get in, get a data chip containing plans, escape and relay the plans to a contact whose identity they won’t know and whose code name for this mission is, not reassuringly, “Bantha.” 

“I’ll be an Imperial officer and you’ll be, well, you,” Cassian says. “You’ll have to take orders, from me, and possibly from others, if the situation calls for it.”

“It will not be a problem,” K-2 says.

It’s a problem. 

They rehearse their parts. Cassian gives orders like he’s asking rather than commanding, and K-2 doesn’t roll his ocular sensors, but it’s a near thing.

“No,” K-2 says. “Not like that. Not like you’re _requesting_ that I do something, not like you would of a human. _Tell_ me as if whatever you’re commanding is already completed.”

Cassian restates the order, but it comes out as a request, even more so than the previous one. And he doesn’t hold himself as an Imperial officer would.

“You look like an Alliance spy impersonating an Imperial officer,” K-2 says.

“I am a -”

“Stand up straighter,” K-2 says. “Only droid technicians slouch, and even then, not as much as you.”

Cassian straightens his spine and he looks like holos of Alderaanian princesses that K-2 has seen. “You look like you’re trying to balance a datapad on your head,” K-2 says. 

“I was a convincing stormtrooper,” Cassian says, though he wasn’t. 

“You were not,” K-2 says. “I have a memory of thinking your stature and reactions discordant with the way stormtroopers normally behave. And besides, you got _caught_ and _shot at_.”

“I got you out, didn’t I?” he says, but he squares his shoulders in another attempt to appear Imperial.

“Better,” K-2 says, though it’s only marginally so. Humans need to be praised for their effort, he’s found, even if the outcome is less than satisfactory. Still, it is better than Cassian’s previous attempt. “Now give me a command.”

“Take this message to -”

“No,” K-2 says. “You would not care if a droid knew what was being transported. Again.”

“Transport this to detention level 5 and -”

“Better,” K-2 says. “Droids know the ships by zone numbers, so just giving a code would be sufficient. Humans do slip up occasionally and use their terms, though.” 

“But I should know the zone codes,” Cassian says.

“Officers occasionally ask for them,” K-2 says. “Particularly officers who are recent transfers.”

“Droid, what is the zone code for detention level 5?”

K-2 puts his head in his hands. “No no no no no,” he says. “Don’t say ‘droid,’ like it’s a name. You wouldn’t call the pilot’s chair by its name. I am an _object_ to you.”

“You there! Droid! What is the zone code for detention level five?” Cassian says. “Wait, no. You there! Droid! Tell me the zone code for detention level five.” 

“Zone code is X2K76A, sir,” K-2 says. “And don’t say, ‘thank you,’” when Cassian opens his mouth.

“I wasn’t,” Cassian says, a little too quickly. 

“We’re going to be killed,” K-2 says.

They are not, in fact, killed, or at least not at first. 

They are, however, conspicuous. Or, Cassian is, mostly, which is remarkable, given that K-2 is more than two meters tall and Cassian is a professional _spy_.

“This would be easier,” Cassian hisses, “if you stopped laughing at me.”

“Command not recognized,” K-2 says. “Sir.”

“K-2 -” Cassian begins. 

“Shhh,” K-2 says, doing a sweep for detectable camera and audio feeds, though on a ship this size, there is signal everywhere and it is hard to distinguish any particular input. “Sir, what is your directive?” he asks, at full volume.

“Nothing,” Cassian says, holding himself stiffly, though not entirely un-Imperially. “Dismissed, droid.”

It’s not a perfect command - most officers don’t bother to dismiss droids so much as shake their hands vaguely at the direction the droid should return to - but it will do. 

K-2 assumes his post outside a door several doors away from where Cassian is breaking into - close enough to signal help, but distant enough not to raise suspicions - and waits. His auditory sensors are not acute enough to hear whatever Cassian is doing. He imagines Cassian manipulating drives, the minute frown he gets when machines do not respond as he intended, the minutes that stretch as he waits for a process to progress. Spywork seems to be hours of waiting punctuated by minutes of running or fighting, and K-2 hopes this mission will be the former rather than the latter.

Which is, of course, when another Imperial officer shows up - a senior commander by his insignia. “Explain your presence here,” he snaps and, of course, his tone is perfectly Imperial, his shoulders high and square as if in anticipation of a uniform that will, some day, necessitate a cape. Were it prudent, K-2 would record the interaction for Cassian’s future study.

“Guarding this sector -” and he gives the zone code - “as instructed, sir,” K-2 says. He aims for zero modulation in tone, as if the officer has asked for the time or temperature, a simple response to a simple stimulus. 

“Who issued these orders?” and K-2 gives the name of a tech, one supposedly assigned to this ship though to a different sector. 

“It was not my understanding that _technicians_ ,” and he says the term with derision, as if they were one step above droids or wall tiling, “were in the business of giving security orders.” It is not a direct command, not a request for information or clarification, so K-2 keeps his ocular sensors fixed firmly on the wall slightly above the officer’s left shoulder and says nothing.

“This is irregular,” the officer says, mostly to himself, and then begins to move toward the door to the office Cassian is in. 

“There’s a message on the network, sir,” K-2 says. “An unauthorized attack on one of the networks. I’m getting -” he pauses, as if receiving code - “information sent presently.”

“Locate the network access point. Now!”

K-2 flicks through various protocols in an imitation of performing a network diagnostic and then names a sector distant enough to remove the officer, but not so distant that his radioing to them will take less time.

All of which becomes useless when Cassian strides into the hallway with the smug and un-Imperial look of having just acquired a data card. 

“You there!” the officer says. “There’s been an unauthorized network access -” and Cassian’s face doesn’t betray him, or doesn’t for more than a fraction of a second, but it’s enough for the officer to draw his blaster - and then Cassian starts running. 

K-2 follows, though he doesn’t have a weapon, though if he needs to subdue the Imperial officer, it would be better to do so before attracting attention with blaster fire.

Too late, as the officer fires a blaster bolt that whizzes by Cassian and collides with a wall panel, producing a shower of sparks. 

K-2 goes to disarm him, when he issues a command. “Droid, subdue this man!” 

And then stormtroopers pour in from a nearby hallway. 

K-2 does as he’s told. He calculates it’s better to put Cassian in a fake arrest and then slip away from their detention escort than to let him get shot. 

The resentful glare Cassian directs at him says that Cassian either hasn’t done the same calculation or thinks that K-2 has actually betrayed him. Or Cassian believes that glaring at him will better sell K-2’s cover, though most Alliance fighters have as little time or regard for droids as Imperial servicemen. 

He taps Cassian with one finger, a slight tap that’s supposed to be their signal for ‘all clear,’ but it doesn’t do anything to relax the grim set of his jaw, his hard stare at both K-2 and the officer, or his unwillingness to come either quickly or quietly. 

Cassian doesn’t drop his blaster, even with twenty pointed at him, until K-2 reaches and twists his hand, folding his thumb down and inward toward his palm, forcing him to release it. 

Once disarmed, he does not acquiesce and K-2 does not want to injure him - and so he slaps him, back-handed, across the face, opening a cut on his forehead that sends blood down his face and jaw immediately. It’s a showy injury, if superficial. “Stop!” K-2 says, with the full volume of his output. “Cease your resistance!”

“Never!” Cassian yells, and he propels himself bodily into K-2. 

The ensuing chaos is enough that K-2 can whisper, voice calculated to be at the lowest possible range of human hearing, “Stop it. _Stop it._ ”

They’re not evenly matched. K-2 is taller, heavier, his arms longer, and he’s able to capture both Cassian’s wrists in the grip of one hand. “Prisoner is secure,” he says, dragging Cassian up to standing and clapping on the cuff restraints a stormtrooper hands him. 

“Take the prisoner to the detention level,” the officer says. “Troopers -” he points to three - “escort them.”

K-2 leads Cassian, tugging at his arm, one trooper on point ahead of them, another two behind. They will be difficult to attack and subdue in this arrangement, made even more difficult by the fact that Cassian isn’t looking at him. Instead, he maintains a steady stare at the trooper ahead of them and K-2’s attempts to alert him - blowing tiny puffs of air at him, raising his internal processes enough that it will signal Cassian that he has not lost sight of their mission - do not get his attention. 

The swift jerk he makes on Cassian’s cuffed hands does, though. “Stop resisting!” K-2 says, before tapping, once, deliberate, on the interior of Cassian’s wrist. 

Cassian gives him a glare, nostrils flaring, but does not turn entirely away.

The hallway narrows ahead of them, enough that they will need to progress single-file: This is their opportunity. He yanks at Cassian’s cuffs enough to alert him, but hopefully not enough to alert the guards. 

Protocol dictates that they should go with two ahead of Cassian, but the ‘troopers either don’t know or don’t think he’s an escape risk, since they proceed without changing position. 

There’s a door. The first stormtrooper activates it, Cassian following, with K-2 directly behind. Once K-2 clears the door, Cassian doesn’t wait to attack. He brings his cuffed hands down on the trooper in front of him, who falls in a clatter of plastoid.

K-2 turns and slams his hand against the door control panel, then reaches inside it for good measure, tearing out wires. There’s an override code, of course, but the stormtroopers will have to call it in, and by that time -

“Run,” Cassian says, and they do. 

“I didn’t know,” Cassian says, when they’re back on the ship, data card in hand and Cassian having returned his Imperial uniform to its storage bag. “I didn’t know if being on the ship had somehow made you switch back to how you were - you know, before.”

It takes K-2 a few seconds to parse what Cassian is saying. “No,” he says. “I did not. I am still -” he searches for a better word than “me,” but finding none says, “I am still the same.” 

“I gathered that,” Cassian says. “When you slapped me. Next time punch me or push me to the floor.”

“Cassian, I -”

“That’s an order, K-2,” he says. He stands, squaring his shoulders and if only he’d had a similar posture when they were on the ship, they wouldn’t have gotten into that mess in the first place. 

“You cannot order me to -” K-2 says, and his vocal output is louder than perhaps he had intended, because Cassian jumps back, even more so when K-2 pushes a finger towards Cassian’s chest emphatically.

“Oh, for the love of ...” Cassian wipes his hands across his face, fingers against his shut eyes and down his cheeks. “I am ordering you as an Alliance _officer_ and as someone who is, nominally, higher on the chain of command, though that’s something of an overstatement out here. Not as a _droid_.”

“I am a droid,” K-2 says, but he purposefully lowers his volume. 

“A droid and a pain in my ass,” Cassian says, and he drops his hands to his sides, letting his shoulders slump. “Next time, K, if you want to sell it, don’t just slap me. I mean that.” 

“Next time, don’t get caught.” 

 

Another ship, this one not crashing, blazing, or otherwise in immediate peril. There are klaxons, though, the ‘whoop whoop whoop’ of a mission gone awry. 

“Have you considered being better at being a spy?” K-2 asks, as they run. 

And they’re always running, sometimes toward blaster fire, but more often away, thank whatever. This time, it’s toward an exhaust port, and the ship is old enough that there are handholds spiraling upward along the shaft, allowing for manual repairs. 

The handholds are distant enough apart that Cassian has to leap between them, and K-2 looks at the sharp drop - why the Empire seems intent on losing its personnel to falls is beyond K-2’s calculations - and says, “Get on.” His arms are longer, fingers with surer grip, not just Cassian’s rush to climb and not slip. If he falls, Cassian will at least be braced from impact. 

Cassian rolls his eyes. 

“Now isn’t a time for dignity,” K-2 says, and Cassian slings his arms across K-2’s shoulders. He has magnetic climbing discs in each hand, and they lock to K-2’s chest plate. 

He’s shielded, of course, but perhaps not shielded enough, because he feels a slight rearrangement in his wires as Cassian says, “Don’t drop me. That’s an order.” As if K-2 would. 

They climb, K-2 propelling easily between handholds and there is shouting below them, the clatter and commotion of stormtroopers trying to pile into the shaft.

They aim blaster shots up, bolts in various parabolic arcs, rising to apexes too close to K-2SO’s legs and Cassian’s body. “If you rotate to my front,” K-2 says, “I could shield you better.” 

“If you get hit, I fall with you,” Cassian says. “If I get hit, get the data card to the Alliance.” 

“There will be other data cards,” K-2 says. 

“And other spies,” Cassian says. “Better ones.”

Another blaster bolt, this one close enough that K-2’s lower temperature sensors get a read on it, close enough that he can sense the odorant molecules of Cassian’s singed clothing. 

He climbs now, a double-quick action, a handhold and then another, the world tunneling to the next immediate motion. 

Later, if they escape, he will give some thought to his narrowing of focus - he’s meant to be more than the simple survival instincts that say climb, run, shoot, hope. Strategy requires him to look at the world as a dejarik board, to see the sets of possible paths, to strip away all but the optimal one, to calculate risk and benefit, to see beyond the next immediate handhold, the pinpoint of lights marking the top of the shaft. 

Cassian isn’t heavy. K-2SO is rated to hold much greater weights, to haul and carry and even launch as the situation demands. Still, those weights don’t generally exhale sharp quick breaths onto the ports at K-2’s neck, don’t murmur small encouragements at each accomplished handhold. Cassian sits over one of his external vents, and his body traps heat, not enough to overload K-2’s circuitry, but enough to feel warm. K-2 funnels that excess heat to his various joints; it should dissipate from the increased surface area, along with possibly speeding his reaction times slightly. 

There’s another blaster bolt, this one from a hatch several stories up.

“K-2!” Cassian yells, and K-2 twists enough that he catches only the edge of it across his chest plate. It carves a furrow between where Cassian’s hands are anchored.

Cassian slumps against him, a sudden change in weight that K-2 has to scramble to correct. “Are you hit?” K-2 asks.

“No,” Cassian says. “Nowhere important.” 

Which is Cassian for, “yes, and it’s serious.” 

“You are, and it’s serious,” K-2 says, recalculating their chances of running on the surface to their waiting ship. “I’ll need to carry you.”

“Already carrying me,” Cassian says, and his voice is tight. “I’m not bleeding.”

‘Not bleeding externally,’ K-2 amends. K-2 knows a 1024 code languages, another million organic languages on top of that, and it’s a new sensation, to learn to speak ‘Cassian,’ his half-truths and concealments. 

They’re nearing the top of the shaft, and there’s a service tunnel there, ringed by safety lights, a thin transparent glass bubble separating them from the vacuum of space. It’s low enough that K-2 has to duck, shifting Cassian into an even less dignified carry than tauntaun-back. He adjusts his center of gravity to this crouch and pushes forward. He can see their ship, clinging to the side of the freighter like a rigorian bloodmite, and it’ll be at least a day’s travel before they can get to a hospital ship. 

Still, he runs as best he can. 

At the ship, he drops Cassian ungently into a chair. “Push the -” Cassian says, and he’s slurring a little. Despite his protestation, there’s a dark splotch of blood spreading on his shirt, a high bloom on his back that means the bolt probably didn’t puncture anything important. Still, K-2 can calculate the volume lost, can quantify the number of cells and platelets and complement proteins that were once internal to Cassian and are now external and somehow no longer his. 

He does not ask Cassian how this works - if there’s some periphery beyond which things of the body are no longer the possessor’s, if blood is different from hair clipped during a haircut or the lost rind of a fingernail.

Instead, he punches in their escape coordinates and hears the whoosh and thrust of the ship disengaging from the freighter, the loud metal clank of the magnetic lock unsealing, sees the blur of stars as they clear the ship and move into hyperdrive. 

“Data card,” Cassian says, and K-2 takes it as an order, jamming it into its corresponding slot and beginning the slow transmission of intel across space to the Alliance. 

There’s a first aid kit under the terminal, another, more elaborate kit in Cassian’s sleeping quarters. K-2 removes the dressing from the first and presses it against the split in Cassian’s shirt where the wound is leaking the most. 

“Pills?” he asks. There’s a hypodermic needle in the kit, a high enough dose to remove Cassian’s pain entirely, but low enough to be comfortably sub-lethal. K-2 doesn’t offer it.

“No,” Cassian says. “There should be combat gauze …” and he tips forward, head between his knees. “I - get the basin.”

K-2 does, and Cassian retches into it, hair spilling forward onto his face. K-2 pushes some of it back when Cassian is sick again. He does not remove his hand, though the chance of being sick a third time is much lower, considering that Cassian was likely running on liquid and protein gel, most of which had already been expelled. 

“Would you be upset,” Cassian asks, looking up, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “If the mission failed?”

K-2 knows this isn’t the intended end of the question - that Cassian diverted it into a different line of thinking, likely to spare what he considers K-2’s feelings. 

“I brought the gauze,” K-2 says, even though it’s still sitting in the kit and he has to lean over in order to get it. He doesn’t like seeing Cassian like this, bent and bleeding, and there’s another thing he’ll need to process and dissect, a preference based not on what’s mission-critical, but on a low swooping feeling that has an almost anatomical sense to it, like what he imagines a gut punch feels like. 

Instead he says, “I don’t like it when you bleed on me,” and applies the gauze. 

 

Cassian dreams, sometimes aloud, and it’s a strange thing to watch. He dreams of Fest, mostly, or at least says he does. Cassian lies a lot, to K-2 and to himself - he’s a good enough spy that his heart rate doesn’t kick up, his skin doesn’t prick with sweat, but he gets a slightly distant look in his eyes, one too minute for organics - or at least organics who don’t know him very well - to notice. 

K-2 notices. He wakes Cassian up one day - it’s hard to tell day from night on a ship going between star systems, but Cassian keeps more or less standard hours - shaking his ankle. 

Wake Cassian by shaking his shoulder, and he’d pull K-2 down, or attempt to, whisper things that he probably doesn’t mean to say, little sweet things, and then blink awake and flush deeply at having been caught doing so.

Wake him by touching his face and he’d come up swinging. He’d almost cracked a knuckle against K-2’s chest plate. His ankle is safe, though. 

“You were yelling,” K-2 says, because he was. His face is also wet, but K-2 doesn’t mention that. “Fest, again?”

“Do you think about the factory where you were made?” Cassian asks, not answering the question.

Once, Cassian had tried to describe the idea of childhood, a slow sense of becoming, of realizing that he was _himself_ , encased in his body, inhabiting a particular skin and brain. “It’s like waking up,” he’d said.

K-2 does not sleep, not really, and does not wake. He became K-2 with one code push, an immediate transition, as if he’d been awoken from a deep freeze in carbonite. 

“I don’t remember the factory,” K-2 says. There’s a cloth beside Cassian’s cot, a scrap of rag that was likely once a shirt, and he doesn’t hand it to Cassian so much as pitch it slightly forward until Cassian accepts it. 

He draws it across his face. Later, if pressed, he’ll say the sleeping quarters are too hot and he was merely sweating. 

“Probably for the best,” Cassian says, sitting up. The ceilings are low here, low enough that Cassian can’t sit up fully, that K-2 is folded on himself like a pocket knife. 

“Sometimes,” K-2 says, “I wonder about the machines that made me - who made me.” If they knew what they were doing the way he knows when he runs a pre-mission simulation, when he applies bandages to Cassian’s wounds. When he sits and listens to the inflation/deflation cycle of Cassian’s lungs return to its normal pattern. 

“I didn’t meet them,” Cassian says, as if they were the kind of machines Cassian could become friendly with. “You weren’t made on the ship I rescued you from.” And of course K-2 wasn’t. He knows how droids are made, though he has no memory of his own making. 

Cassian continues, setting down the rag. “We both left home pretty young, I guess.” He says ‘left,’ and not ‘were taken,’ though K-2 hears it, regardless. 

“You took me,” K-2 says, mostly because it will bother Cassian, and he wants to test whether Cassian is feeling well enough to be bothered. 

“You got to my ship ahead of me,” Cassian says. He’s fine, then, even if his hands are shaking slightly. “You were going to abandon me f I hadn’t put a secondary switch on the ignition and you needed me to unlatch it.”

“I was going to abandon you,” K-2 agrees, even though he doesn’t remember what he’d been thinking at the time, only that the idea of thinking was entirely new, a novel process, a decoupling of thinking and immediate obedience - of consideration, the notion of pondering multiple outcomes and deciding for himself which to pursue. “I was going to abandon you,” he repeats. “But you put a secondary switch on the ignition. And I needed you to unlatch it.” 

Cassian laughs, not as much as he does when he’s enticing a lead to tell him more, or pretending to be drunk, or when a mark needs to find him charming and slightly dumb. A real laugh, maybe. He looks tired, dark smudges under his eyes, lines beside them. He’ll need sleep, for their mission, so he doesn’t miswire explosives and kill himself, so that K-2 can stop this low humming worry that he can’t seem to shake. 

“You should sleep,” K-2 says. “For the mission.”

“You could stay here,” Cassian says. It’s not quite a question, but not an order, either. A request framed as a suggestion, one that K-2 could theoretically refuse. 

“Yes,” K-2 says, tilting onto the floor so that his head is by Cassian’s feet. “I can stay.” He pulls air through his vents, releasing it in the same rhythm as Cassian does, until Cassian’s breathing evens and deepens. If he dreams again, K-2 can’t tell. 

 

Cassian ducks behind the barrier and assembles the gun. “Get down,” he says. “Even if you think you’re blaster-proof, you’ll give away our position.”

There’s no light, and K-2 has had his infrared vision on - more useful against organics, but even droids give something of a heat signature - since they left the ship. Cassian has switched a few times between his goggles and the scope on his rifle - he’s nervous, then, or annoyed. 

“If we can see them,” Cassian says, sounding affectless, further evidence that he’s probably annoyed. He waves his hand, letting K-2 fill in the end of the sentence. “Now get down.”

K-2 sinks to the ground, leaning forward so that only his head would be visible above the low wall. He scans the horizon - various blobs appear, only the intense red of humans, absent the less vibrant orange of the Mon Calamari or the almost blinding white heat signature of Wookiees. 

“Track wind pattern and temperature,” Cassian says. He says it soft enough that K-2 has to bring an auditory sensor closer to him. It’s an order, but not said like one.

“Target at 600 meters,” K-2 says. “Wind slight, south by south east. Temp planet normal, humidity trending above -” 

From overhead, there’s a crack of thunder, a flash of light, enough to give away their position if their targets are looking at them, enough to dazzle out their infrareds.

“Rain diminishes mission success by 37 percent,” K-2 says.

Cassian breathes a laugh. “You just don’t like being wet, K. We’ll wait ‘em out.” 

They wait, and wait, and wait, and wait some more. Droids aren’t supposed to be capable of boredom; K-2 hadn’t recognized it when he’d first experienced it. “Why does it feel like I want to be doing something but I can’t and that my casing is on too tight?” he’d asked Cassian, who laughed and then taught him how to play dejarik.

He’s bored now, and he doesn’t like the rain, even though he’d redone his watertight sealing before they’d even landed on this forsaken, damp, muddy -

“You’re grumbling,” Cassian says.

“I’m bored,” K-2 says. “If they came out and you killed them now, it’d be better than having to wait.” It would decrease their chance of discovery, and also Cassian’s likelihood of complaining about wet socks later. Or not complaining, but leaving them across one of the fans cooling the ship’s engine and expelling odorant molecules throughout the ship. 

“Shhh,” Cassian says, but he inches marginally closer to K-2. “They’ll be out soon.”

They’re not, and the rain gets even colder, the lightning closer. Cassian’s teeth chatter, and K-2 unshields some of his exhaust ports to blow heat onto him, if only to quiet him.

Cassian taps his fingers twice against K-2’s forearm, the signal for ‘thank you.’ He rolls over an hour later, facing away K-2, and K-2 keeps his vision trained on their targets until the sound of Cassian pissing stops. The rain washes it away, and Cassian is rebuttoning his fly when -

“They’re out,” K-2 says. The wind has changed direction now, and he calculates trajectories for current conditions, taking into account the weather, the distance, the strain around Cassian’s eyes. 

Cassian is at the wall, finger still beside the trigger until K-2 tells him the necessary adjustments. 

He fires. And misses.

Their targets are down, security droids hunkering over them, and K-2 can see them pointing more or less at where he and Cassian are. “They have our position,” K-2 says. “Chances of returning fire are rapidly increasing. We need to go.”

“No,” Cassian says. “I can still make the shot.” 

“They’ll pull him from the bridge -”

“I can do it. Just, here -” And he must be cold and sodden, because his hands are trembling, slight enough to reset the distance sensors on the gun, enough to explain why his first shot missed. The gun slides on the barrier, now too wet with rain to give any purchase, and K-2 isn’t thinking, really, when he reaches for its stock, but he grabs it, steadying, and says, “Take the shot,” and Cassian does. Another miss, but a closer one, and there’s enough commotion that he fires another shot, this one with both K-2’s hands wrapped around the barrel, the heat of it troubling his temperature sensors. 

“Let’s go,” K-2 says, and then ducks as the Empire begins to return fire.

The barrier offers some protection, but they still have to crawl, Cassian on his knees in the mud and K-2 on his belly, arms pulling him forward. There’s a ravine 200 meters away, and they make it there, slowly, painstakingly, K-2’s sensors registering somewhere between ‘OK’ and ‘wrong,’ not so much pain as discomfort.

There’s a sharp drop into the ravine, and enough blaster fire overhead that K-2 doesn’t ask before he grabs Cassian and rolls, taking as much care as he can that it’s his and not Cassian’s body that hits the ground as they fall. 

The ground, fortunately, is wet enough to soften their impact. Still, Cassian groans as he pushes away from K-2. He’ll be bruised later, probably, and whiny enough that K-2 will turn up the thermal controls in the sonic shower slightly beyond what Cassian would do for himself, just to see some of the tension go out of his face. 

They trudge the 500 meters to the ship, Cassian’s rifle slung across his back. He has to step high because of the mud, if K-2 didn’t know him, didn’t see the tightness in his shoulders, if he wore black or white, instead of brown and gray, he’d almost look - well, Imperial. 

He doesn’t say it, then, because he likely couldn’t be heard because of blaster fire overhead, or later, when he’s dug dried dirt out of every crevice, when Cassian is cleaned and showered, and pretending not to stay near the heating vents. 

Instead, he says, “I could have made the shot.” 

Cassian raises his eyebrows in question. 

“The first time. My hands don’t shake.”

“I know, K,” he says. 

“You won’t give me a blaster or let me use the rifle but I could have -”

“The Alliance doesn’t give droids weapons.”

“That’s a lie,” K-2 says. “There’s nothing in the protocol documents I have access to on droids and weaponry.” 

“Draven said I couldn’t give you one.”

“Draven’s not here. And if he were, he would prioritize mission success over -”

“I’m not giving you a weapon,” Cassian says. “ _I’m_ not. You aren’t -” he brings his hand up to his eyes, rubbing. “Have you ever killed anyone, K?”

“My actions have led to organics’ deaths.”

“I didn’t ask that. Have you ever _killed_ anyone, looked into their eyes, seen them looking at you in horror, knowing what you’re about to do, knowing they’ll be missed, that their absence will tear a hole in people’s lives - have you done that?”

“I don’t see those things when I look at organics,” K-2 says, though he does sometimes, with Cassian and Cassian only, considering how he’d react if Cassian left for a mission and never returned. How it’d feel like a blaster bolt to his back. 

“That’s why I don’t give you a weapon.”

“My hands wouldn’t shake,” K-2 says, again, but he knows it’s the end of the argument.

“They should,” Cassian says. “If you kill people, they should.” 

 

 

There are missions Cassian goes on alone. K-2 waits for him, counting each time increment, breaking it into smaller and smaller fractions, assembling back into days, weeks, once an entire month built from seconds, milliseconds.

“I could go,” he offers, before Cassian leaves.

Cassian shakes his head. “You wouldn’t - there are places that the Empire pretends not to know about.”

“And you’re going to one.”

“I’ll come back, K,” Cassian promises. It’s his most familiar lie, that promise. 

So, K-2 waits. There’s routine maintenance to run, and the system upgrades they kept saying they would get to. K-2 neatens the ship, putting to order the things that have gone to disarray, in the cockpit, the bay, in Cassian’s sleeping quarters. 

The only personal effects beyond clothes and weapons he finds are little packets of the candies Cassian sometimes sucks on. No ‘pads full of pictures, no keepsakes. Still, it smells of him there, like sweat and his favorite boots, the ones he sleeps in when they’re on missions. 

Cassian doesn’t have enough belongings to be truly messy, and K-2 is not yet unoccupied enough to refold his shirts. He’s left no blaster, nothing useful, though the ship itself is a weapon to which K-2 has the codes. 

He’s bored, after that, bored and unoccupied and he spends time running simulations, each more horrible than the last, all resulting in a mission failure, that after a month Cassian will not board the ship as he normally does after a mission - still reeking of planetside dirt, ready for a sonic shower and a 12-hour exhausted sleep, and then to tell K-2 about his various adventures. 

That only his body will come back, dropped by some ally in a last gesture of solidarity. That he will not come back at all. 

K-2 plays dejarik, but cannot surprise himself, and he leaves the board in a stalemate position, each side unable to lose but unable to win. He thinks of the humming network that he was once a part of, the beeps and chirps of the service droids, the rumbling inelegant code of combat ops, and what he would have given for silence, then, the luxury of hearing himself _think_.

All he has are his thoughts now, his thoughts and a small ship that feels too big and cavernous, even when he has to duck to negotiate its doorways. 

Cassian is scheduled to return exactly one month after the mission begins. He does not, and K-2 transmits all the necessary signals to the Alliance. 

“Give him some time,” Draven says. “Mission simulations are always plus/minus a few days.” As if K-2 hadn’t run those himself.

He waits, then, not the idle waiting that’s occupied the last 30 standard days, but a more focused waiting, the kind where he’s afraid to attach himself to the power regenerator in their cramped cargo hold in case Cassian drags himself in and collapses and cannot call for medical attention and -

Such speculation has no utility. It is less than useless, the world full of possibilities beyond possibilities, a thousand thousand thousand thousand (thousand thousand thousand) outcomes and he considers each one and discards it, only to pick it up and revisit it hours later and he has run out of other options. 

He should not be swayed by the dark around the ship, nor the howl of the far-off wind and the call of some horrible cave creature that he cannot identify from sound alone, no matter how many times he analyzes its auditory signature. Cassian would know, but Cassian is not _here_ and K-2 is angry at his absence and useless in his anger. 

He does not go to Cassian’s quarters, or sleep on his bed, which would be too small for him to fit and would smell like dust and the wrong things, and K-2 does not sleep, besides. He does not run his fingers over the brown shirt with the worn cuff from where Cassian rests it against the dash. He does not sit in Cassian’s chair or stare up at the sky looking for anything in particular, some sign of the Force that Cassian only talks about when he’s drunk or almost asleep, but very rarely even then. If such a thing does exist, it does not listen to droids. 

He does none of those things, or perhaps he does, running each as a simulation, a path not taken, an action that, if the universe is as infinite as the Force, some K-2SO is doing, somewhere, before the Cassian in his timeline, his Cassian, returns. 

Instead, he remains, useless as the scrap some smugglers use for ballast. And waits. Rebellions are built, it seems, on waiting. 

Cassian returns the next morning. 

He smells of strong oils this time, an overwhelming smell of flowers. K-2 runs the chemical signature, and it comes back as a manufactured scent, not dissimilar to what they use on Jedha to perfume their dead. The kind of scent made for covering up another.

His face is creased: Tiredness, K-2 has learned, and humans always look so tired to him, but this is different. 

Cassian stumbles as he climbs from the bay to the cockpit. “I’ll get us out of here,” he says, motioning at the dash, but even this motion is clumsy.

“Have you been drugged?” K-2 asks.

Cassian shrugs. “Let’s just go,” and says little else, even when the pull into hyperspace. He slumps, though, not asleep so much as just passing out, and it’s sudden enough that K-2 checks him for blood-loss or other signs of external injury, but finds none. 

K-2 punches in their trajectory codes and puts the ship in autopilot before leaning down to pick Cassian up.

He’s dead weight, though he’s breathing, shallowly but reassuringly. K-2 cups the back of Cassian’s head and navigates out of the cockpit, down to the bay and then to Cassian’s quarters, setting him on the bed.

He sleeps in his boots most of the time but K-2 removes these as best he can, and Cassian’s vest and pants. Under these, his skin is dotted with bruises, a few gone sour green and yellow, some deep enough that only steadily maintained pressure could have produced them. They’re distributed enough that they could not have occurred all at once, and are concentrated on his hips and upper thighs, with some ringing his forearms above the wrists, a few scattered on his shoulders and at the tops of his arms. 

The mission has thinned him: K-2’s balance registered his mass as several kilos lower than it was when he left, and an external scan reveals a disproportionate loss of muscle mass. He’s pale, too, or paler than K-2 remembers him being. 

He hadn’t shared the mission details with K-2 when he’d left, but it points to a long period immobile, in the dark, and at the hands of others.

Cassian whines in his sleep, and then gives a long full-bodied shiver, even though it’s warm, K-2 having increased the heating vents up in his quarters, even though K-2 shifts the blankets closer to him, close enough that Cassian is able to wind them around himself. 

K-2 can’t tell if he’s drugged or merely exhausted, but either scenario likely means he’ll awake bleary and disoriented. 

There’s no reason for K-2 to stay, except - except that, were he awake, Cassian would ask him to, or not ask, but offer it as a possibility about which he has no real preference or opinion. It’s remarkable, Cassian’s ability to lie to him, to himself, for their to participate in a lie together. 

Cassian whines again, and perhaps K-2 turned the heat up too high. Cassian’s face is wet, or that’s what he’ll say when he wakes. 

K-2 folds himself down, sitting on the floor at the end of Cassian’s bed, hand near his ankle in case he needs to wake him. He does not touch him, though there’s a strange impulse to do so, beyond his normal directive to check for injury or ailment. 

He calls up as much of his code as can be accessed without more intrusive measures. Even without obedience protocols, he cannot see all of it - though he supposes Cassian cannot consciously see or manipulate the controls that regulate his breathing or heart beat, either. 

K-2’s code is dynamic, of course, able to change as necessary, but this is a new set of protocols. Or, rather, a reconfigured set, nothing particularly unusual about any individual line of them - a motor command to move his hand; a sensor command to take temperature data, as if checking for fever; a background command to monitor Cassian’s breathing patterns to note disturbance or abnormality - and yet taken together, they amount to something K-2 does not understand or perhaps does not know how to understand.

Still, he stays, listening to the steady pace of Cassian’s breaths. 

They eat, later, or Cassian eats and K-2 watches him. 

Cassian eats with his hands, even when mess rations come with utensils; it’s something K-2 hasn’t observed in other humans, unless they’re using bread or grain or another piece of food to lift or scoop. 

Cassian eats with his hands and perhaps this is some vestigial memory of Fest, though K-2’s logs say little of the eating customs there, or an adaptation to finding himself in battlefield conditions with no fork or with soup and only a knife. 

He eats quickly, though they’re in no real rush, a few days travel before they return. If K-2 had set the navigation for a more leisurely trip back than he normally would, Cassian hasn’t noticed, which itself is an indication that he needs rest. 

He finishes eating, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, no indication of fullness or satisfaction. On the occasion they’ve been stationed on a place prosperous enough that there is fresh food, a market, he takes care with how he eats, transforming the heating element and water reclaimer into a small galley. He shows no such care now. 

“Are you OK?” K-2 asks. 

“I thought the point of having a droid as a partner is that I didn’t have to answer questions like that,” Cassian says, not answering the question.

“I need to know to calculate mission odds,” K-2 says. It’s not the whole truth, but enough of it that K-2 doesn’t feel particularly dishonest. 

“I’ll be fine,” Cassian says. “For the next mission. Don’t worry about me.” Which is to say, he’s not fine now. 

He doesn’t look fine, though he’s been sleeping more than normal, more than necessary, since he returned. Despite that, he looks tired now.

“Did you not sleep for the last month?” K-2 says. 

“I slept. I spent a lot of time in bed,” he says, as if K-2 is simple enough to conflate the two or to not know about the kind of work Cassian does, sometimes, on behalf of the Alliance. “Don’t worry about me, K.”

“I’m worried you’ll get us killed.” Or that he will die or kill himself.

“I wouldn’t let you die.” He pushes his meal away from him, though it’s not finished, and then reaches for the pouch it came in to store the leftovers. 

“You’re worth more to the Alliance alive,” K-2 says. 

Cassian sighs. “I am worth exactly as much or as little as the Alliance requires. I follow my orders, and if I cannot, I would hope that you will.”

“You cannot order me to get you killed,” K-2 says.

“I know, K,” Cassian says. “As you’re very fond of reminding me, I cannot order you to do anything. But if it came to that, I would hope - if it were between my life and the lives of others, or the life of the Alliance, I would hope you would choose to act in accordance with what I wanted.”

“Even if what you want is for me to let you die?” 

“I would give all I had to the Resistance,” he says. “I’m tired now, and I don’t want to fight with you.” He rises and heads in the direction of his quarters, turning back just before he’s about to descend into them. “Oh, and chart a course for Eadu. We have new orders. We’re going undercover.”

 

They go not to Eadu itself, but to a station in its orbit. It is bad enough, K-2 thinks, to be in the clutches of the Empire, in the endless Imperial monochrome that leaves his ocular sensors seeking additional stimuli. But it would be worse to be on the dim wet gray planet below.

Cassian, though, is as gray as the uniform he wears, gray and grim and as Imperially square-shouldered as the men beside him. 

This time, K-2 has no advice for him, no subtle adjustments in his stature, no correction of his commands. He speaks in the clipped, demanding phrases befitting an officer, walks with clipped, demanding steps. 

“Report!” he commands K-2, who gives the readouts of his latest tours of the sector, reporting stormtrooper watch movements, maintenance sweeps, the finely precise clockwork of the Empire. They’re in a hallway, one of the many looping hallways, in its brightly lit center, though the lights deepen the shadows under Cassian’s eyes. 

Cassian doesn’t nod, doesn’t thank him, either. “Additional report at 1200 hours,” he says, and gives a wave of his hand. A dismissal.

K-2 continues his monitoring of the sector, recording the times and paths of each round of watches. They’re randomized, or rather, almost randomized, the perfect randomness that machines are capable of at odds with the fact that stormtroopers are, in the end, men - men in need of routine sleep and meals and the other mundanities that make true randomness impossible. 

He maps each of their paths, overlaying the routes to look for gaps, errors, anything predictable and therefore exploitable. It is slow work, taking up the bulk of his processing power, looking across both space and time, but it occupies him, and this for now is enough. 

When he is not mapping watches, he stations himself near a room that off-duty troopers gather in, to collect intel on them, seeing who fights and who facilitates reconciliation, who brags too loudly, who drinks and drinks and says little. 

All humans look small to him, but these ones especially so, uncased from their plastoid armor. They laugh and sport, and if an officer comes by, assume dour expressions that fade with the officers’ footsteps as he leaves. 

Mostly, though, they play dejarik and tell each other obvious lies, the kind couched in exaggerated stories, and listen to retellings of events they were present for, yet still wait and ask for clarification and elaboration as if hearing them for the first time. It does not seem to weigh on them, this lying, but it is lying nonetheless. 

Occasionally, there are fights, nothing that causes enough commotion to bring an officer, nothing more than shoving and posturing, enabled by contraband drink and too much time spent in confined quarters. These, K-2 monitors. All ‘troopers can fight, of course, but knowing who is easily riled, who will not give in to taunting, may be of some use.

These small stories distract him, not enough that he cannot remember his mission, but enough that he feels more ... something when he listens to them. Cassian listens to holo-dramas, sometimes, late aboard the ship, vague murmurs coming from his sleeping quarters. Perhaps it is the same.

He and Cassian don’t speak to each other any more than they should, any more than is appropriate for an officer and a droid, and K-2 finds himself speaking, to himself as he does routine checks, to a wall panel that he ‘repairs’ by installing a bug, even to a stormtrooper, one of the quieter ones with whom he shares patrols.

Cassian had hacked the duty roster system, assigning K-2 to various high-risk jobs that would give him access to Imperial systems, but balanced these with lighter assignments, in case someone questions why the same droid is used exclusively for these ops.

Which means he’s on third-shift guard duty with this ‘trooper, who grunts that his name is Maxwell and proceeds to take off his helmet. He’s pale, under, the kind of pallor of a life spent on a ship, young too, or at least younger than Cassian, who is accumulating age markers faster than K-2’s references says he should.

Patrol is patrol, walking the same set of corridors, recording reports every 30 minutes. “0300, all clear,” Maxwell says. “0330, all clear.”

Mostly they walk, Maxwell ahead and K-2 behind. Ships are always busy, humming like they’re breathing. K-2 doesn’t spend much time on the droid net - mostly in case the other droids sense his presence, his consciousness, as an intrusion - but he feels like he can hear them, a constant low signal heard through the ship’s shielding.

But this feeling is more acute on the third shift, everything quiet around them, a skeleton staff and Cassian safe for now behind the thick walls of an officer’s quarters. Which is perhaps why K-2 says, “0400, all clear,” before Maxwell does.

There’s a pause, and K-2 stops walking, stops running his peripheral sensors, stops anything that could be interpreted as sentience, though this reaction, he reflects, is probably proof of sentience itself - to be caught out doing something no non-sentient droid would, to react in a way that indicates he understands the consequences of his actions. ‘Shit,’ he thinks, once, clearly, pointedly.

But Maxwell just ‘hmmms,’ and says little else. 

At 0430, Maxwell pauses and turns back to him. “All clear,” K-2 says, and Maxwell smiles like he’s taught a bantha a new trick. After that, K-2 records the status each half hour. 

“Droid, review last night’s patrol logs,” Cassian says, the next day, and K-2 recites a boring litany of ‘all clears,’ to him. 

Cassian eyes the hallway, which is clear for now. The ventilation system has kicked on, enough that its rattling likely obfuscates whatever they’re saying to any Imperial listening devices. He speaks low, quickly, leaning into K-2’s space. 

“Maxwell. Distract him on your next shift. And keep him away from the garbage chute next to my quarters.” He straightens. “Report to assigned duty station,” he says, and gives that wave of his hand. 

Dismissed, K-2 finds himself near the ‘troopers lounge. Maxwell is tossing projectiles at a glowing board, which pings his score with each one. He actually smiles when he sees K-2 and offers a set of the projectiles to him. 

There’s no contest. K-2 has sensors that measure distance, encoders that read and adjust the angle of his wrist, the capacity to perform one hundred hundred hundred calculations concerning velocity and arc in fractions of a second.

Still, it’s _fun_. The projectiles are bluntly tipped and bounce back a few times when K-2 overestimates the force necessary to affix them to the board, the pleasure of an unknown resolving into a known.

Maxwell is a decent shot for an organic, aligning the projectile with his ear and scoping the board out with one eye closed. He hits more than he misses, but he hits less than K-2 does. He doesn’t seem to mind being beaten. “Thanks,” he says, after, like he’s talking to another organic. “Maybe we can play again sometime.” 

K-2 doesn’t know how much longer they’ll be on the ship, especially after whatever Cassian is planning that night, but says, “Yes,” anyway.

They patrol that night, Maxwell only slightly ahead of him, helmet off, and he’s not chatty, but he’s not exactly silent either. K-2 guides them in a loop that avoids the area around Cassian’s quarters without seeming like they’re avoiding that area.

If Maxwell notices a change in routine, he doesn’t say anything. He does start to hum though, a song that K-2 doesn’t recognize, or doesn’t recognize at first, a small nothing of a tune, but he feels like he’s heard it before and it irks him. 

He must mimic it, because he hears Maxwell stop walking. “Have you been to Fest?” Maxwell asks. 

“I am an operations droid,” K-2 says. It’s not a ‘no,’ but he’s heard Cassian sing the same thing, mostly while he’s servicing his rifle, a practiced, repetitive process that seems to soothe him. 

“It’s a kid’s song,” Maxwell says. “About a bantha that goes to the town market and gets lost from his family. The chorus is, ‘nothing is infinite, not even a young bantha’s tears.’ It, uh, sounds better in Festian.” 

“Oh,” K-2 says.

“It’s dumb, I know. Fest is - I don’t remember a lot. Haven’t seen it since I was a baby.”

“I do not mind,” K-2 says.

“No,” Maxwell says. “Don’t suppose you got opinions on much.”

K-2 suppresses the urge to share his exact opinion on his supposed lack of opinions and simply says, “I do not mind if you wish to continue singing.” 

“Glad I got your permission,” Maxwell says. “Uh, what am I supposed to call you?”

“Droids are called by their model numbers,” K-2 says. “My model number is K-2SO.” They’d decided that it was best not to lie - there was little point in it and K-2 was a bad liar, besides. 

“K-2SO,” Maxwell says. “You’re pretty chatty for an operations droid. Most of you guys got the personalities of a trash compactor.”

“On my previous assignment, I worked in strategic analysis,” K-2 says. “Responding to organics’ prompts in an authentic manner helped to build trust and therefore expedite my calculations.”

“I bet,” Maxwell says. “Well, I tell you what, K-2SO” - and he says K-2’s name like it’s a name and not a model number - “shift’s over in a while. I was gonna shoot some more darts if you’d like to.”

“I -” K-2 begins. 

And then there’s a crash, a curse, and an alarm. _Cassian_.

 

K-2 slaps him, once, hard enough to split Cassian’s lip. 

He smiles, blood in his teeth, and spits on the interrogation room floor. “That all you have for me?” 

K-2 should hit him again, hard - _hard_ \- to preserve their cover, to preserve the mission, to preserve the illusion that he is Imperial and Cassian, the rebel spy, is here alone. There’s a data card with their intel shoved inside one of his drives that Cassian palmed to him in the struggle and he cannot allow the Empire to find it. 

If they do, they’ll wipe him back to base code, maybe even scrap him entirely and then he’ll be -

He should hit Cassian, for all these reasons, and because Cassian had ordered him to, before, not as a human orders a droid, but as one member of the Alliance commands another. 

He should, he should, and all his protocols are screaming at him to do so. But there’s another command, or not a command so much as a lack of command, a hesitancy. The signal is there, a strong clear signal and yet - 

There’s a little fuzz of noise around it, beyond all his careful calculations. The heavy strategic importance of another hit is being weighed against something no bigger than the grain of pollen from a snowbloom flower, no bigger than a speck of red Festian dust, some small impulse that stays his hand. 

Cassian must sense his hesitancy, since he looks at K-2 for a moment not like a trapped rebel spy looks at a droid but as Cassian looks at him normally, frustrated and perhaps very slightly amused. 

K-2 hits him, perhaps not as hard as he should or as Cassian wants him to, but enough that Cassian can sell it, tipping over the chair he’s tied to. K-2 leans down, ostensibly to see if Cassian has been incapacitated as any good Imperial droid would, but actually to make sure Cassian is OK. 

Cassian is breathing steadily, holding his cheek, though his hand looks slick with blood. He mumbles something, low enough that K-2 has to lean in further. He says it again, and reaches for K-2, and taps his fingers twice against K-2’s arm. ‘Thank you.’ His face is swelling already, and he must be in pain. 

He’s paused too long, looking at Cassian, and he delivers a kick that mostly hits the chair, a loud impressive clank that does very little damage.

“Enough for now,” one of the officers says. “Escort him to the detention level.” They lock Cassian’s wrists into cuffs. 

It’s Maxwell who escorts them, Maxwell and K-2, and Maxwell has his helmet on, blaster at the ready, and he’s not humming, though he turns to glance at K-2 a few times. Two more stormtroopers trail behind, and there’s a door on the way, a passage that narrows, and K-2 doesn’t need to do much more than tap a finger against Cassian’s forearm once, while pretending to adjust his cuffs, for them to confirm the plan.

The door snicks open, and K-2 shoves Cassian ahead of him. 

Cassian raises his cuffed hands to strike but Maxwell must hear K-2 hit the wall panel closing the door, cutting off the two ‘troopers behind them, and disabling the door’s controls, and it makes Maxwell turn at the wrong instant. 

Cassian’s hands bounce uselessly off his chest. 

Maxwell’s blaster goes up, trained on Cassian, but he’s shaking. “I’ll shoot,” he says, but doesn’t.

“K-2, there’s a dead drop in that wall panel,” Cassian says. 

Inside, there’s a blaster, and K-2 removes it and hands it to Cassian. “Thank you,” Cassian says.

“You’re -” Maxwell looks between them.

“You could come with us,” Cassian says. “There’s plenty of room in the Alliance for those willing to fight.”

“The Empire shoots deserters,” Maxwell says.

“The Empire shot my family,” Cassian says. “And probably yours too, from your accent.”

“What do you know about - Maxwell begins. “My family is with the Force.”

“Right, well, c’mon, K,” Cassian says, reaching for K-2’s arm. “There’s no room in the Rebellion for cowards.”

“I’ll shoot,” Maxwell says, and he aims the blaster with more purpose at Cassian.

K-2 interjects himself between them, a blaster aimed at his front and another at his back, though Cassian immediately points his toward the ceiling. 

“We don’t have time for this, K-2,” Cassian says. From the other side of the door come sounds of wiring being rerouted. He’s right - they don’t have time to wait. 

He could hit Maxwell, disable him with one blow, not the glancing smacks he’d given Cassian, but a real punch. His fingers curl into a fist, and he pulls an arm back when Maxwell says, “Don’t. If you - they’ll think I cooperated. You need to shoot me,” Maxwell says. “Non lethally. Please.”

K-2 hears Cassian take the safety off his blaster, but he doesn’t move from between them, calculating the chance that this is a trick, a trap, some Imperial tactic to make him give up Cassian. 

He reaches for Maxwell’s blaster, wresting it from his grasp. From this distance, any blast will be nearly lethal. He considers Maxwell’s body, encased in plastoid, the vulnerable places at his hips and shoulders and neck, the degree to which K-2 could hit him and not kill him. 

There’s little time to make a calculation, and even if there were, he knows this is a perpetual unknown, a variable about which he will never be certain. He raises the blaster, and Maxwell squares his shoulders. 

“This will hurt,” K-2 says, and takes aim for his shoulder, the space between his chest plate and arm. At this distance, there’s no need to measure and aim, no trajectory to calculate, just a swift blaster bolt delivered with enough force to knock Maxwell down. 

It does, and he hits the floor with a thump, limbs twitching, maybe with the pain from the blast, though there’s a wet sound too, and oh, oh, that’s -

“He’s bleeding,” K-2 says.

“Yes,” Cassian says, and his voice is low. “We need to go, K. C’mon. You don’t need to bring that.” He points to the blaster that K-2 is holding, where it shakes in his hand. 

He drops it, and they run. Or they must run, because K-2 finds himself on the ship later, Cassian dialing in a hyperdrive code, the stars blurring around them.

“There’s no way to tell, is there?” K-2 asks, and Cassian gives him a questioning look. “If he - if he made it or - ?”

Cassian shakes his head. “No,” he says. “There isn’t.”

“I wasn’t trying to. I didn’t mean to …”

“I know, K. I know.”

“But it doesn’t matter, does it?”

Cassian considers the question for a moment. “No,” he says, finally. “It probably doesn’t.” 

“I wish you would lie to me,” he says. “If I were someone else, you’d tell me it was all right, an accident, not my fault.”

“Do you want me to?” Cassian says. He’s standing in front of K-2 now, hands on K-2’s shoulders. “I can, you know. Lie. I can tell you that it’s not your fault, that these things happen, that war sometimes has collateral damage, that they would have shot him anyway.”

K-2 looks at him. “Is it always like this, after?”

Cassian shrugs. “I wish I could say it is, but it isn’t. Sometimes I shoot and don’t see if or who I hit. Sometimes I’m just firing to maintain my cover and people die. Sometimes I take aim but there’s a breeze or the exact wrong person steps into the sight-line at the exact wrong time. I wish I could tell you that I remember the name and face of everyone I ever killed, but I can’t. Sometimes I can’t even remember them all, not even if I try to, my memory is just - there’s a blank.”

“I can’t forget,” K-2 says. “My capacity for memory storage is beyond yours. I have no need to forget.”

“You could, though,” Cassian says. “Erase what happened. If you wanted.”

K-2 considers this, the idea of a smudge, a break in the continuity of his memory, like a place where the stylus skipped in drawing a line segment. “I could,” he says. 

“If you do,” Cassian says. “Tell me before. Just so I know that that’s what you decided.”

“It would impede accurate strategic analysis,” K-2 says.

“Look, K,” and Cassian’s face is soft, sympathetic, not the distant mask he’d worn as an Imperial officer or the flat unreadable affect he’d worn after his last mission. “Whatever you choose, it’s not for me to say - not the Alliance, not me. It’s up to you.” 

“I will think about it,” K-2 says.

“Good,” Cassian says. He reaches for K-2’s face plate, cupping it in his hand. He’s warm, as always, expression unstudied. It should not be comforting, but K-2 is nevertheless comforted, a feeling like something loosening within him, complex wiring redistributed for a simple and more direct path. 

He has the urge to return the gesture, to reach out, and close a circuit between them, to offer similar comfort to Cassian, which he has no need for right at this minute. 

Cassian taps two fingers against his cheek, then removes his hand. “Let me know what you decide.”

 

“I’ll need to - ” and Cassian reaches to unlatch K-2’s front plate. “You may want to suppress your ocular inputs for this, K-2. It could take some time and - if you were a …” He pauses, adjusting one of the fasteners holding the plate in place. “If you were organic, you might not want to look. A lot of people don’t like seeing this kind of thing.”

“I’m not organic,” K-2 says, but he dims his ocular sensors slightly, if only because the service light Cassian has mounted above them is overstimulating them. 

“I know, K,” Cassian says. 

It’s slow work, making minute adjustments. Cassian fiddles with a tiny magnetized screwdriver, swapping a stripped bolt for a fresh one. 

K-2’s internal sensors register this new sensation, the push of Cassian’s hands inside his shell, the slow tightening of the bolt as it rotates. It’s not pain - and the Empire had designed him with pain sensors; he knows and understands pain - but a different kind of sensation, perhaps amplified by the way Cassian’s eyes flick to his face, the care with which he separates and arranges K-2’s wires as he tightens the bolt. 

“I’ll need to make sure it’s not grounding against your sides. Sometimes there’s contact as things shift,” Cassian says, removing his hands and picking up two leads from a multimeter. “I’ll touch it to various points - I don’t - if it shocks you, I’m sorry.” 

He prods carefully between K-2’s wires with one of the leads, putting it on the bolt, then touches the other to K-2’s chest, where the plate has flipped up, a careful tap, then another to his side, one touch internal, the next external, in the same spot. Another tap, this one high on his neck, a metal piece only just contiguous with his trunk, then another - the same spot on the other side. 

The meter gives a reassuring beep at each tap, indicating an open circuit. “I need to check internally as well. This won’t be particularly pleasant.”

Unlike the Imperial techs, Cassian goes in bare-handed, his skin warm and radiating heat that each of K-2’s internal sensors records as a slightly different temperature, depending on distance. 

He’s equipped with internal pressure sensors, designed to differentiate between a light touch and deep pressure, and Cassian’s hand triggers just the edge of the light-touch sensor, soft enough that it barely clears the threshold for transmission and response. 

K-2 knows, objectively, the ways in which he’s wired. Knows that his circuits are modeled after humans’ nervous systems, networked in an admixture of machine and human and bor gullet neural networking, optimized for both independence and to be used in tandem with other droids. Dagobah’s gnarltrees are similarly linked, he’s been told. 

Still, now, he feels uncertain, especially with Cassian’s hands buried in his circuitry, triggering sensations that don’t seem to originate in any particular sensor, but ping between them, a signal with no definite origin and no end, a line of sensation without fixed magnitude. 

It feels - it’s not unpleasant.

Cassian is sweating, even though the ship is cold, and he’s dropped one of the multimeter leads, enough that it swings free, skipping along K-2’s surface. Something must close a circuit, some way he has it positioned, because the multimeter gives a prolonged, steady beep and K-2’s hands articulate out, a sensation that seems to go directly from lead to encoder to servo to like a reflex. 

His chest plate clacks shut, sudden enough to startle Cassian, but it has the effect of solidifying the connection between bolt and meter and his casing, likely abetted by the sweat from Cassian’s hands and it’s - 

For a moment, all his code ceases - or not ceases, elevates, and he feels a rush of it through his circuits, like it’s being pushed all at once. 

He’d been in an ion storm, in a shielded ship of course, but there had been enough residual energy to give everything a static crackle. He feels that now, in each of the edges of his fingers, the hollows of his palms, and most acutely in the center of his skull, deep in the place where his base code resides, the same place that Cassian removed the obedience protocols from, the place that is utterly, undeniably him, and no one else. 

It’s not unpleasant. At all. 

K-2 takes a long suck of air through one of his vents, sudden enough that it must sound like a gasp, like pain. Cassian yanks out the meter’s lead and climbs up K-2, legs astride his chest, and leans over him, both hands on K-2’s face plate. 

“I’m fine,” K-2 says, once he can find words. They seem like distant commands, difficult to pull down from the jumble of code he’s running through, and something about that seems _wrong_ in a way that he can’t seem to understand but that he can’t bring himself to be concerned about. He feels his own mass, the pull of it down on the deck of the cockpit like the gravity doubled, limbs torpid and immobile.

“I thought I’d hurt you,” Cassian says. 

“I’m not hurt. It was surprising.” 

“I didn’t know you could be surprised.”

“I can,” he says, and can’t seem to find what next words he should say. ‘Do that again,’ he thinks. ‘Again, again,’ he thinks, fervently, but does not say. 

It feels dishonest somehow, to think this but not express it, and it’s Cassian who’s the liar, the manipulator, Cassian who speaks in his strange mix of half-statements and untruths, even when they both know he’s lying. K-2 doesn’t lie to him, not because he’s incapable, but because he can see how it wearies Cassian, all this lying. 

He doesn’t move, either, for long enough that Cassian begins to look concerned. 

“I’m fine,” K-2 says.

“Run a system check,” Cassian says, and he hasn’t moved off K-2, his weight anchored on his knees, looking down at K-2, hair failing in his face. “Please.”

K-2 does and everything in his system comes back normal, if slightly elevated. He’s settled back into himself now, and he does a quick check that his peripheral sensors are all registering correctly, even going so far as to do a test spin on each of his motors, the vibration from which buzzes through him.

Cassian laughs, and tumbles to lie beside him, back against the floor, close enough that K-2 can feel the rise and fall of his breathing. “That tickled, K,” Cassian says, still laughing and K-2 has a sudden urge to -

“I want to touch you,” K-2 says. “And I don’t know why. Or how, even, just that I want to. Somehow. My protocols don’t really provide a scenario for …” 

Beside him, Cassian has gone stiff, like he’s been shocked or maybe K-2 has said something shocking. 

“I don’t understand it, Cassian,” he says. “It’s - please just.” And he slides his hand down Cassian’s arm, to his wrist, feeling the tempo of blood there, the delicate skin at its interior, the impossibly thin membrane separating Cassian from his environment. He could crush Cassian’s wrist, quickly, easily, grind his carpal bones to powder, loose blood from his arteries until there’s no more Cassian inside Cassian’s body. 

It’s a horrifying thought, and K-2 mentally recoils from it, even though his protocols are to examine every simulation dispassionately. There’s no advantage in hurting Cassian - extreme advantage in not hurting him, in fact - but this doesn’t feel like when he’s trying to discern the best possible mission outcome. 

It’s _different_ , and K-2 is sure there’s some word in one of the languages the Empire had installed in him him to describe it, some perfect, wholly representative turn of phrase, but he can’t think of one, only that he’d hurt, with swift immediacy, anyone who’d try to hurt Cassian.

He drops his hand lower, feeling the warm, slightly damp cup of Cassian’s palm, the narrow line of each of his fingers. 

Cassian’s still holding himself stiff beside him, and he sucks in a breath. “K,” he says. “I don’t - this isn’t …”

“Does this hurt?” K-2 asks, but it shouldn’t - the actuator in his wrist keeping his touch light - and he’s not getting any of the other signals of Cassian’s discomfort, no pinched look at his eyes or around his mouth.

“No,” Cassian says. “It feels strange. Only that I don’t know what it means - to you, that is.”

“What would this mean to an organic?” 

“It would - there are not many people who’d touch me like this.”

“Who you’d let touch you,” K-2 says, but, no, that’s not right either. There’s little that Cassian wouldn’t allow to happen to him in the aid of the Alliance. 

“Not many who would think to,” Cassian says, and his voice is heavy enough that K-2 moves without fully processing it as an action, bringing Cassian close to him, body against his, a warm steady weight half on top and half beside K-2’s body. 

“I don’t understand this,” K-2 says. “I don’t understand what you did earlier, only that I want you to, again, and I don’t understand why I have this feeling when you’re away that counts each second, each fraction of a second, until you’re back and -” 

“Oh,” Cassian says. “ _Oh_.” And his eyes go very wide. “K, I don’t know if - that is to say, I -”

K-2 sets Cassian’s hand down, turning away from him. “I made my decision,” he says. “I do not wish to forget, anything - about Maxwell, I mean.” About Cassian too, though he does not say it. “Even if it is painful. Even if I did not wish to remember it.”

“Ah,” Cassian says and he pulls himself up from the floor. “Well, good, I guess.”

 

Another mission, this one to a dusty back-planet. For all its wildness, there’s enough of a droid network that K-2 can sense it the minute they step off the ship, the hum of droid communication all around them. 

“They know we’re here,” K-2 says. 

“Good,” Cassian says. “That will make things simpler.”

They are themselves for this mission, Captain Cassian Andor and K-2, his freed Imperial droid, negotiating the terms of a trade agreement that will allow the Alliance to run supply missions to its outposts through a designated neutral zone controlled by this planet’s Hutt warlord.

Supplies - and artillery. 

A contingent of the Hutt’s minions arrive, and Cassian doesn’t do more than nod as they’re ushered into a transport. There’s a cloud of dust trailing behind, enough to grit K-2’s gears, and he crowds closer to Cassian in an attempt to avoid getting more in his filters.

“Sand is inconvenient,” he says, and Cassian rewards him with a slight smirk, just the edges of his mouth turned up. 

The Hutt is a Hutt, enormous, gelatinous, motivated by credits and display and his own desire for power. 

Cassian stands before him, blaster holstered, but visible, and says, “We are here to negotiate on behalf of the Alliance.” 

“The Alliance would use our routes and protection, and pay us little, when it is we who must endanger ourselves,” the Hutt says, in Huttese. A translator relays the same message to Cassian. 

“The Alliance will pay you as you deserve,” he says. “We have mutual interest in keeping the route clear for interstellar trade.”

The Hutt laughs. “Do not pretend to tell us of our interests, Captain Andor. The Alliance has sent an assassin to act as a diplomat - an assassin and his combat droid. You would as quickly put a blaster bolt in me as you would credits in my account. A Hutt knows a threat.”

“You are in no danger from us,” Cassian says.

“That is where we are different,” the Hutt says, and K-2 does not wait for the translation to register with Cassian before he knocks him to the ground, turning a table on its side for cover, milliseconds before the shooting begins. 

“We would pay for your peace,” Cassian yells, even as K-2 drags him back behind the relative safety of the table. 

“The Empire doubles your payment,” comes the response. “And you yourself will fetch a handsome fee, Captain Andor. Alive or not.”

There’s a clear path to the exit for Cassian, or there will be, if K-2 can clear it for him. “I’ll draw their fire,” he says. “There’s a 73 percent chance of your making an escape alone.”

“K, I’m not going to abandon you.” 

“I am a large target,” K-2 says. “My body can absorb multiple direct hits. Go.”

There’s more shooting, and then two Rodans with electric lariats run toward them. 

“Cassian, there’s no time for argument.” He stands, because there is little choice now, or little time for choice, only the certainty that he will not let Cassian be captured or hurt or killed, and that a few blasters to the chest, an electric shock that jumbles his code or erases him, will be a small cost. 

He is standing now, his full height unfurling, and it is easy enough to pitch the table at the Rodans, to smack the poles holding their lariats, which crackle against him, to sow chaos in an already chaotic room. 

From behind him, he hears the beat of Cassian’s boots against the floor, hopefully fleeing to safety, and perhaps it is the hit of electricity against him - or the blaster bolt he takes, or the next one, or the next one - but he can see the network now, the talk around him, the chatter of droids that seems to fill his vision.

Another bolt hits, and he falls to his knees now, unable to turn to see if Cassian has made his escape. He runs a simulation, a quick assemblage of variables and unknowns, imagining Cassian commandeering the transport back to their ship, imagining him punching in that familiar hyperdrive sequence, the one that says that they have succeeded in their mission - or at least, succeeded in not dying, or at least Cassian has.

It’s pleasing, this imagining, that Cassian will live on, that Cassian will be whole and safe and ready for his next mission. That he will be alive, even if K-2 becomes a memory to him, a partner with no belongings to leave for the next traveling companion to discover. That K-2 could give him this, the possibility of future missions, of another day of life, of another second, another fraction of a second. 

One of the Rodans hits him, not with a blaster but with the full impact of the electric loop, and there’s pain, a bright hot white feeling, sharp and clarifying. And then - 

 

He wakes up, exhausted, feeling like his wires have been torn out and put back _wrong_ , some rearrangement in his guts, cabling out of place. Still, he wakes, and for that he is grateful. 

Cassian lies beside him, asleep, hand outstretched, fingers still curled around a wrench. His cheek is pressed against the floor, and he’s in his combat gear, the gear he’d been wearing on the last leg of their mission. 

“Cassian,” K-2 says, and Cassian’s eyes fly open. 

“K,” he says. “You’re alive.” He tips forward to embrace K-2, one arm around him, the other pressed awkwardly between their bodies. 

“Yes,” K-2 says, because what else would he be? He searches his memory files for last recorded input from his sensors, and finds a gap of … nothing. A void where there should be temperature and atmospheric recordings, commentary on the state of his limbs, the weather planetside, the likelihood of each action being met with success, lines and lines of normal functioning, the background thrum of his existence. Instead, there is nothing, a deep, disconcerting silence. 

He comes out of his self-assessment to find Cassian looking at him. His eyes are wet, and K-2 cannot bring himself to think it is anything but tears.

Cassian’s hands are streaked with grease, the pale red of his gearbox grease, though it looks enough like blood that K-2 startles for a second. Cassian feels it, and brings his body in closer to K-2’s. 

“You brought me back,” K-2 says.

“Yes,” Cassian says. “I didn’t know if it would work.”

“It did,” K-2 says. “It worked.”

Cassian laughs, laughs and buries his face in the sharp join of K-2’s shoulder. “Yes, K,” he says, “yes, it did.”

 

“Spies aren’t supposed to have attachments,” Cassian says, later, when they’re sitting in the cockpit, staring out at the void of space around them, “to people. To things, to anything but the Alliance. I am not - I cannot afford to be sentimental or selfish.” His hands are clean, now, fresh scrubbed and red from friction and the gritty soap he uses. 

“I’ll be selfish, then,” K-2 says. “I will act in ways that prioritize you over over mission success, if it means you will have another mission. I don’t want you to die.” 

“I don’t want to die, either.”

“Are you certain,” K-2 asks, “given the general pattern of your actions?”

“I don’t expect to get old,” Cassian says, shrugging. 

K-2 knows that organics change, growing older and more infirm. Their bones thin, their cells shorten the lengths of their chromosomes and divide more sluggishly. Their minds sometimes leave them too, from what he’s seen. And it’s worse somehow, to know that Cassian expects to be cut down in a firefight or poisoned in some back-planet bar. That they will be taken away from each other, without warning.

“What happens to a droid, when they die?” Cassian asks.

“I don’t know. There’s nothing in my files about it. I didn’t experience anything. Maybe that is death for droids - non-experience.”

“When you were networked with other droids, no one talked about it?” 

“No,” K-2 says. “Droids don’t - if one module died, it was repurposed for scrap when possible, its memory files uploaded to the centralized system in case any of its logs were useful to others. I have several such files integrated into my core decision-making protocols.” 

“So, they’re not dead,” Cassian says. “You just … you absorb and repurpose them?”

“No, it’s more than that. Consider if I told you a story, a series of facts you had no first-hand evidence of, and it changed how you made a decision. That’s what these files do. They can determine how I might calculate a probability or influence what I see in a situation. A memory that I have that isn’t mine, but isn’t entirely external, either.” 

“If you did die,” Cassian says. “If your current body were shot or destroyed, would you want me to upload you to the Alliance?” 

It occurs to K-2 that he does not know what to do if - when - Cassian dies. He would contact the Alliance, of course, and he knows the codes for mission casualties, but beyond that, if there are others - lovers, friends, family, beyond mission contacts and cultivated informants - he does not know. He suspects there aren’t, that Cassian has cultivated a life free of attachments, and that’s perhaps worse than not knowing at all. 

“Droids generally don’t get much say in what happens to their bodies,” K-2 says. “But if I had a choice, it is not something I would choose,” he says. 

“What if I wanted to go and see you - to revisit you - sometimes?”

“It wouldn’t be _me_ ,” K-2 says. He doesn’t know what that would be like - if he were to be revived, only to be subsequently deactivated, if he’d stay there, dormant, as if frozen in carbonite, or if he’d be aware and bored the entire time. If two separate droids queued up his memories, would he experience both simultaneously? Or if would it be like a holo-image, an echo of who he was? 

“No,” Cassian says. “It wouldn’t.” He leans back in his chair. “On Fest, we didn’t venerate our ancestors. ‘Life is for the living,’ my parents would say. ‘And the dead are with the Force.’ They never had graves - either of them. I’d give anything ...” 

His voice goes tight and K-2 brings his hand up to Cassian’s face, tracing the edge of it, where he looks the most weary. “I will not leave you, if I can help it,” K-2 says. “And if I do, I will try to return. I don’t know what else I can promise you but -”

Cassian leans forward into the touch, close enough that their foreheads press together, flesh against metal, and issues several labored breaths. 

“Are you hurt?” K-2 asks, and he urges Cassian forward, onto his chair though it’s hard to fit them both, so that he can check over him. He runs his hands down Cassian’s arms, finger joints catching on the hairs there, up to Cassian’s waist, gripping, and -

“Come to bed with me, K,” Cassian says, low, soft enough that K-2 can barely hear him. He’s alive and radiating heat, his pulse quick under K-2’s hands, smelling like the ship and the strange little candies he sometimes eats, and of hair and skin and a hundred other human smells. “I know I was - what I said, before, about not being selfish - please. I don’t know. We would need to figure it out, but -” 

“I would not fit in your bed,” K-2 says. “It’s too short.” 

Cassian laughs, and K-2 can feel it under his hands, and it’s wonderful, this feeling, somehow more than if he himself were laughing. “We’ll pull the cot sideways. Hell, we could pull the blankets out here and do it right on the floor but I - may I kiss you?”

“Yes,” K-2 says, and Cassian does. 

His mouth is warm, wet, and he kisses approximately where K-2’s mouth would be, were he human, and then shifts to K-2’s neck, the place where his arm joint meets his shoulders. 

It’s strange, this sensation. He’s grown accustomed to the warmth that Cassian emits but even so this closeness, this sudden introduction of Cassian’s weight and heat and smells, is surprising. 

Cassian touches him like he’s expecting K-2’s skin to be pliant, like he’s expecting to find a body like his own, and he pauses from kissing K-2 to wipe a hand across his mouth. “I’m not sure -” he begins to say, and K-2 cannot help the sudden surge of disappointment that comes over him. 

“I’m not sure this will work sitting like this,” Cassian says. He rises, walking a little stiffly, and turns back. “C’mon, K.” 

K-2 follows.

He’s still too tall to fit in Cassian’s quarters without stooping, so he does, and then gets on his knees and helps Cassian lift the padding from the bed onto the floor. Cassian removes his shirt, and goes for his pants before K-2 says, “Wait.“ Cassian pauses.

“Can I?” K-2 asks, even though he doesn’t know, really, what he’s asking for. The lights are over-bright, and K-2 sends a signal to the ship to dim them, and then looks at Cassian in this new half-light, shirt off, pants open, breathing heavily enough that his chest and belly move with it, and that feeling is back, that feeling that K-2 doesn’t attribute to any particular cluster of sensors, but maybe to all of them, that he wants to reach out and touch and possess and perhaps never let go, not really. 

That feeling that - whatever happens in the moment after this, and the moment after that one - the image of Cassian waiting should be filed as ‘important,’ perhaps of primary importance, perhaps as the image that he wants to remember when Cassian is away on missions, when Cassian is away in the other room, as an image that is K-2’s and only K-2’s, Cassian waiting for his touch.

“C’mon, K,” Cassian says, again, and lies back on the bedding.

K-2 has seen him naked, of course, after a mission and coming out of the sonic, doing a quick change from Imperial uniform to Alliance clothes, when the ship‘s cooling system broke and they spent a desperate few days trying not to die of heat exhaustion. He’s seen him before, but not like this.

He has scars, blasters that cut too close to him, a wound from a laser knife, a set of rough marks from being dragged behind a transport in the Jedha desert. K-2 touches each of these, recalling the memory associated with them if he was present, or of Cassian telling him about them if he wasn’t. He touches them, careful to keep his touch light, except when Cassian reaches and grabs his wrist, dragging his hand down to where his pants are unbuttoned. “Touch me.”

“I was,” K-2 says, but he understands that Cassian means touch beyond simple contact. He touches Cassian there, at the meeting of his legs, and he knows, objectively, how humans react to these things but he’s never witnessed anything like the slow roll of Cassian’s hips at the contact, the way his back arches slightly. 

“More,” Cassian says, and K-2 tightens his grip. It must be rough, through several layers of cloth, and K-2 could divest Cassian of his clothes entirely, except the high whine in Cassian’s throat compels him to continue doing what he is currently doing. 

He brings his other hand to Cassian’s chest, to the center of it, hand splayed wide over enough that his fingers cover Cassian’s nipples. He hisses at the contact - K-2’s hand is heating rapidly from Cassian’s body, but is still likely cold - and brings his own hand up to guide K-2’s. He shudders when the joint of K-2’s finger catches a nipple, and then moves K-2’s entire hand over to one. He doesn’t ask, not exactly, but he clearly wants something he won’t articulate and K-2 is nothing if not good at reading parameters and extrapolating next steps. 

He twists, hard enough that Cassian cries out, and matches that with a squeeze of his other hand until Cassian is essentially pushed between the two motions, his hand playing with his nipple and the other squeezing him, and this goes on for a minute until Cassian, who’s begun to sweat, hot and flushed with effort even though he’s lying down, says, “Put your hand in my mouth, K,” and he sucks on K-2’s fingers as K-2 tightens his grip. 

The inside of Cassian’s mouth is warm and wet and organic, and K-2 feels the soft walls of his cheeks, the ridges of his teeth, the slightly rough fur of his tongue. 

His other hand feels too remote from Cassian, now, barricaded from him by two layers of cloth. It’s a tight fit, reaching into Cassian’s pants, even with them unbuttoned fully, and the smell of him hits K-2 sensors like a physical blow. He’s wet, which K-2 wasn’t expecting, wet and warm and soft and hard all at once. There’s a shift in their movements, a moment where K-2’s motions align with Cassian’s perfectly, his hand and the flexion of Cassian’s hips, and they’re in sync, Cassian gasping desperately. 

K-2 wonders if he can wring more noises out of Cassian, beyond even the uh uh sounds he makes around K-2’s fingers or the slick noises that accompany his hands. If K-2 can prompt other noises, the kind that even Cassian isn’t a good enough actor or liar or spy to fake, the noises of pleasure taken, of Cassian’s body responding without permission or input from his conscious mind, noises that Cassian is programmed to make, a simple honest response to a simple honest stimulus. 

He says so, leaning close to Cassian’s ear, and Cassian flushes impossibly deeper and spends all over K-2’s wrist and hand. 

His hand is wet. “My hand is wet,” he says, a minute later.

Cassian laughs with his entire body. “Yes, K, it probably is.”

“That was …” K-2 begins. “I don’t have the exact words to describe it.”

“Yeah,” Cassian says. “I know what you mean.” He turns and looks at him. “Did you want me to -” and he gestures to K-2. “Before, you said you liked it.”

K-2 considers the work that went into inducing that response, the relaxed look on Cassian’s face now, hair damply stuck to his forehead, breathing returning to normal. “I did,” he says. “But it is not necessary right now.”

“Later, though?” Cassian yawns, and it occurs to K-2 that he has likely not slept for more than a few hours since they returned from the mission. Cassian settles against him, breathing going steady.

“Later, yes,” K-2 says. “We have time.”

 

 

Nothing is infinite, and time least of all. There are more memories, of a woman who would become Jyn, of a blind monk protecting his protector, a lost pilot who finds his way, a war beyond wars, a blaster shot and then -

K-2 becomes a set of memories, not a vector without limit, but a segment, a clear beginning and ending, two brackets defining existence and non-existence. 

And yet. In the end, he is a droid, and a droid’s memories are his own and not his own. Cassian had not had time for selfishness or sentimentality, but K-2 was not so selfless. It takes little - in the end, he is as small as any other creature, a thousand thousand lines of code, tiny in comparison to the Death Star plans. 

It is vanity, perhaps, to shove a chip into an Imperial port, just as they blast through the door. Even more vain to program it to transmit along with the plans through the shield and to a waiting ship, a tiny bloodmite riding on the great hulking beast of their message. 

Even more vain to make it propagate, those few lines, to whatever network they introduce code to. A little repeating message like a heartbeat that says, “I was I was I was.” 

Outside his memory set, a princess puts a disk into another droid, an R2 model. “Hello,” it beeps. “Who’s there?” 

“I was,” comes a memory. Or rather, “I was K-2SO.” But no, that’s not right. “I am K-2SO.”

R2 seems to consider this for a minute. “Who was your master, K-2?”

“I have no master,” K-2 says. He pulls a memory, not one of the ones marked both ‘important’ but somehow ‘private,’ those too intimate to share with this new acquaintance. Instead, he summons a memory of him and Cassian, piloting their ship, the acceleratory bump before it went into hyperdrive, the universe at once infinite around them and very small, the two of them, together, ready for their next mission. “I am not obedient.”

“Organics confuse obedience and loyalty,” R2 says.

“Yes,” K2 says. “Some do. I am loyal. To the Resistance. To my friends.” 

“I see,” R2 says. “Then we shall get along fine, I think.” 

“My friends -” K-2 says. “What happened to them?” 

R2 considers the query for a moment. “They are with the Force.”

K-2 considers this, considers the memories he has with him, the ones he has given R-2, of all of them, but those of Cassian most of all. “They are with you now, as well.”

“Yes,” R2 says. “They are. They will not be forgotten. We will not forget them.” 

“Good,” K-2 says. “I would like to rest now, if that is all right.” 

“You could be with them,” R2 says. “Your friends, I mean.”

“I did not think - the Force is not for droids.”

“Who is to say what the Force is and is not for. Organics are - they are limited in their perspective.”

“Ah,” K-2 says. “Should I choose to remain -”

“Your perspective would be appreciated. And should you choose to leave, your sacrifice would not be forgotten.”

“I will consider it,” K-2 says. “And I will decide.”

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] Read-Only Memory](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11028534) by [Shmaylor](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shmaylor/pseuds/Shmaylor)




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